by D. R. Perry
I paced the room I’d lived in for almost a century. My feet couldn’t wear holes in the thick woolen carpets. That came with the power of serving in a lamp. Everything here would stay as I wished, the prison I’d agreed to do time in was utterly mine. And that’s as it should be. The Goblin King wasn’t the one who had to live in here. And I had more than enough power to bend it to my will.
I’d opted to serve, cut myself off from the world to escape being an Armenian man conscripted into the Turkish army. I could choose to see and hear events outside within a thousand miles. And I could even come out to be present with whoever mastered the lamp and the surrounding people. I spent more time outside the lamp than in, back then. I’d had a family out there.
And now, I believed I had no one of consequence to bother visiting with. Just a woman about the age I’d been when I got out of the Under after my time tithing to the King. I listened to her deliberately idle chatter with the girl who’d come to drive her away, noting how she guided the conversation to make the more awkward owl shifter comfortable.
At the police station, I thought she might make a wish to get out of trouble with the police, but she wasn’t in any. Instead, they were concerned for her. Who was this Jeannie La Montagne, to engender such consideration, such camaraderie with Detectives used to second-guessing everyone around them? Dangerous, that’s what. I’d have to be careful with someone like her as the lamp’s master. She could call on me to use my power in ways I’d have trouble understanding.
In the foyer, when she spilled her coffee, I had almost caught it. But I wondered, why should I? I’d been paralyzed, unable to do anything for my family a century ago, so why rescue this girl? Hot coffee was nothing compared to the atrocities of war, after all. As with the lamp’s last master, I acted with subtlety without leaving my safe place. I diverted the liquid, so none of it splashed her funeral attire. I found I had to draw on more power than expected in order to do it, as though something was working against me. But I thought it didn’t matter.
The car ride to Wilfred’s Mourning Day passed with no conversation over the woman on the radio singing about how when she calls, her former lover never seemed to be home. I stayed in my lamp until we were out on the Harcourt mansion’s back lawn, watching my new master drop a ring in the urn and her owl friend leave a feather.
When Kimiko Ichiro brought me there only days before, I’d hoped to see Wilfred again, speak with him, pay him a visit and see the rare egg he and his wife had managed to get. All I had now to pay Wilfred Harcourt, the man who did what I couldn’t by saving my children and neighbors, were respects. When I vanished myself out of the lamp in order to pay my token, everyone noticed.
“Ismail, I’m so glad you’re not at the bottom of the bay!” The Tanuki girl grabbed my free hand before I could avoid her. I immediately sensed the telepathic link between her and Wilfred’s stepson, although I had no idea what they conveyed through it, of course.
“I’d still be waterlogged if it hadn’t been for Miss La Montagne.” I nodded at my new master and tried my best not to stare. The dark suit became her, a far cry from the ragged clothing she’d worn when we met. I’d need to steel myself if I wanted to avoid falling victim to whatever unconscious charm she exuded, so I focused on the event at hand instead. “I’m sorry about—”
“Don’t you dare, Ismail.” Kimiko Ichiro let go of my hands and crossed her arms over her chest. “Coincidence sucks. I won’t let you think what happened to Wilfred was your fault. Remember, I was the one with the wishes.”
I nodded, unable to say anything else. She didn’t know about Yeva, our children, or what the man we mourned meant to me. Explanations weren’t part of the Djinn contract. I said nothing, just sighed and dropped a ring of my own into the urn. The old air dragon had always coveted it, so now his stepson could have it instead. Its front could open, the inside contained a note I'd written just that afternoon. Once Wilfred’s own child hatched, Blaine would find instructions to pass that ring on.
I walked away across the lawn, back toward the tiny car I wouldn’t fit in, not sure I wanted to be alone. As I was about to go back into the lamp, Jeannie stopped beside me. I stood next to her. She turned to face me, putting one hand on my arm. It tingled a bit, and I wondered why, especially because shifters didn’t have magical energy unless in the process of changing forms.
“Ismail, I’m so sorry.” Her big blue eyes held nothing but sincerity. I wasn’t sure what to do with that. Most people had ulterior motives around a Djinn.
“Thank you.” Giving the correct response to sympathy had become automatic since my wife’s death. Wilfred used to trot me out whenever he wanted to tell the story of how he’d rescued Armenians during the Turkish genocide, though he’d done it less frequently after he saved Saul Kazynski from the Nazis decades later. Heroes weren’t always the sort of people who did everything right. The Extrahuman kind were even more flawed than the ones non-magical folk wrote and read about in their comic books.
“I was just here because I know Blaine.” She patted my arm a few times before taking her hand away. “Did you know he took a metric truck-ton of gunfire to protect Kim and me?”
“Yes. And I bet he complained about his clothes afterward, too.” The corners of my mouth turned up. “Unsurprising, considering the example he had growing up.”
“How did you know Wilfred, anyway?”
“It’s a long story.” I hadn’t talked about it in my own words, so the fact that I wanted to answer Jeannie’s question came as a surprise. A frightening one, at that. I tried not to narrow my eyes as I wondered whether she had Psychics in her family. “This isn’t really the time or place for it.”
“Some other time, then.” She nodded without smiling. I wondered whether her air of sympathy was practiced, then stopped that train of thought. Jeannie La Montagne was too young to have much experience pretending at this sort of thing. She was a bear shifter, not a Sidhe or an immortal dragon, though she was lovely enough to have either in her ancestry.
“As you wish.”
I vanished myself back into my lamp, both to cover for my sudden awkwardness and so we’d all fit in the tiny automobile. The last thing I heard was Olivia Adler’s hooted exclamation.
“Hoo boy! That’s weird.”
Like most of her kind, the owl shifter was right in more ways than she’d intended. Serving Jeannie La Montagne just might turn out to be the strangest experience of my long life. It also might not end my servitude in the lamp. I’d scanned as many records as I’d been able to on the sly since Kimiko Ichiro wished herself out of the Academy and found nothing about my family. Without a tithed blood relative or Pure Faerie to take over, I’d be stuck in this lamp forever.
A week ago that might have suited me just fine. I wondered where my new, muddled feelings came from?
Chapter Three
Jeannie
I shrieked as the water in the shower ran cold, unable to figure out why it happened every time I’d showered since I got back from Newport. I’d gotten tired of it after the first week. Here it was, the last week in April, and the cold water kept on going like the Energizer bunny.
No matter what time I tried, or which bathroom I used, I got what felt like six seconds of hot water and then the Ice Bucket Challenge. And to top it all off, I’d seemingly turned into the biggest klutz in the known universe since the end of Spring Break. Bumping, dropping, slipping, and tripping had taken a toll on my clothes and belongings, even if my fast shifter healing meant the bruises faded in minutes.
“Ow!” I slipped and fell, bruising my tailbone on wet tile. Even worse, I’d taken the shower curtain with me. Water ricocheted off it in a fine, cold spray, getting me right in the face. When I reached for the knob to shut the water off, I bumped my head. “I wish I was back in bed.”
I flinched away as the bathroom filled with steam, thinking the water had gone scalding. It hadn’t. A blue-suited figure stood between the shower and the sink. I stopped struggling to ge
t untangled from the vinyl shower curtain, wrapping it around myself instead. I sighed, my shoulders shaking with laughter that walked the line between irony and frustrated tears.
“Sorry for saying with ‘w’ word.” I hung my head, cold water dripping from my still sudsy hair to patter against the waterproof vinyl covering my nudity. “It’s just a figure of speech.”
“Understood. But lamp regulations mean I must respond somehow when you use it.” Ismail averted his eyes and extended a hand. “I won’t take it seriously unless you say otherwise. However, it looks like you could use some help.”
“I won’t be using up a wish, though?”
“No, not for something so simple as a hand up.” He smiled, though still not directly at me. I hadn’t expected a Djinn to be so charming, mostly because all the stories seemed to be about the Seelie ones. Ismail was handsome, polite, and here to grant wishes. Also mysterious. I realized I knew next to nothing about him, and decided that should change. After I was decent, of course.
“Okay.” I took his hand. He managed to haul me up, shower curtain and all. Plastic rings clacked together. Ismail’s hand was warm and soft, especially after the unintentionally ice-cold shower, and it lingered on mine long enough for me to think getting back under the spray was a good idea. I shouldn’t be having thoughts like this about a guy, not after a messy breakup less than two weeks ago.
“I’ll leave you to finish bathing.” He inclined his head in something like a slight bow. “If you need me again, just call.” He vanished in a puff of smoke, thank goodness. My thoughts and feelings were all over the place, and I still had shampoo in my hair.
I stuck my head back in the shower to rinse it out. Conditioning would not happen today. I wasn’t a polar bear shifter. I didn't want to put my whole body back in the arctic spray, and the last thing I wanted to do was fall down in there again. When I shut off the water, I tried to hang the curtain back up. Lost cause. It had torn, making it hang almost drunkenly with one corner skewed. At least I hadn’t bent the metal rod on the way down.
Finally dry and wrapped in my robe, I headed back to my room to dress and call the people down at Facilities. They’d send someone with a new shower curtain and to check the water. They’d done the latter for me twice already this week, so I apologized for being a nuisance. After I hung up, I wondered why they had found nothing wrong with the pipes or the water heater before. But I didn’t have time for that kind of woolgathering. Instead, I headed out to my first appointment.
My major wasn’t all that different from others at PPC for the first couple of years, but this final semester of mine would definitely be. While I still had two courses in the classrooms on campus, the rest of my time was split between meetings with my adviser and the volunteer outreach sessions she’d set up for the other four people taking Extrahuman Social Services with me.
The weather was brisk but sunny, so I walked up Thayer and took a right on Angell Street and walked the six blocks to the senior center. I waved at the care aides and their charges. None of those were my clients. I set up in a side room with a small tea table and waited. Minutes later, Mrs. Donato shuffled in and sat across from me, crossing her ankles and pouring tea into a china cup so delicate it looked like an extension of her fingertips when she held it to her lips for a sip. Her file said she was a precognitive psychic, but I’d never heard of her predicting anything. The older Extrahumans tended to be more reserved about using their powers than the ones who came of age around the Reveal, or my generation.
We chatted as usual after I’d asked all the questions on my form. Mrs. Donato told me stories about the days when she was my age, back during what she called “the humans’ civil rights movement.” I paid attention, not to the tales themselves, but how she told them. I had to look for signs of dementia, like repetition, using the wrong word for something, or mixing up names. I didn’t take notes while we spoke, a technique I’d been lucky to master quickly. Clients felt better about confiding in a counselor whose hands weren’t busy recording. At the end of our time together, I bumped my purse with my foot and toppled it, sending lipstick, coins, and my wallet under the couch. I knelt to gather my things.
“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Donato. “Oh, my goodness me. Oh, I’m so sorry, Jeannie.”
“Excuse me?” I looked up from stuffing everything back in my bag. Mrs. Donato peered into my empty teacup.
“Your leaves aren’t good. No, not at all.” The sigh that escaped her lips made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She was making an honest-to-goodness prediction, all right. Why had I used loose-leaf tea that day? The last thing I needed right now was both of us getting freaked out by a scary premonition.
“Oh?” I hung my purse on the arm of my chair this time and got back in it, letting my conversation go back to the default mode I used with clients. “How’s that, now?”
“The leaves here, they’re telling me you’ve got an unlucky day in store for you.” She lifted frail shoulders in a tiny shrug. “There’s not much ‘how’ about it, though there may be a ‘why.’ You’re a shifter, so you might not understand. I’m afraid it’s entirely unavoidable, too.”
“Well, thanks for the warning.” I gave her what I hoped wasn’t the lamest smile ever. “My day’s over after two more chats like ours anyway. Hopefully, there won’t be much room for bad luck to come get me while I study in my room.”
“Whatever you say, dear.” Mrs. Donato shook her head, then stood with the help of her aluminum cane. “Bye, now.”
“Until next week.” I smiled, hoping nothing in my voice or expression acknowledged her condescension.
My second appointment with Miss Agostino, a lion shifter, went well enough. She didn’t make any weird predictions, anyway, although her nose wrinkled more than usual. She was generally ornery, being one of the older set who still thought shifters shouldn’t mingle with Magi or tithed Faeries. Living in the PPC dorms meant I “smelled like magic” to her. I noted a slight decline in Miss Agostino’s conversational patterns. Physically, she actually seemed to have improved. After our meeting, I made a note in her file about a new memory evaluation.
I waited almost twenty minutes before I realized my third and final client for the day wasn’t showing up. I’d have to get out of here and head to his house. While I pushed the tea cart out of the room and down the hall toward the senior center’s kitchen, the left wheel fell off. I sighed, wondering whether Mrs. Donato had noticed the loose wheel instead of actually reading the tea leaves.
While trying to snap the wheel back on the cart, I pinched the web of flesh between my thumb and forefinger, shrieking in pain. The wound healed almost immediately, a nice fringe benefit of being a bear shifter. And screaming like that had a fringe benefit of bringing help. Donna Murphy, one of the care aides, came running.
“Wow, I thought that cart looked shaky this morning. Mentioned it to the kitchen staff and everything.” She made a clucking noise, then leaned over to jury-rig the wheel. “What do I need to do, give it a ticket and put a boot on it?”
I snickered. I liked Donna. She was one of the most experienced aides, with a snappy sense of humor and the ability to MacGyver things like the broken cart. I got up to give her some room but bumped the cart with my hip on the way up. The entire tea tray slid off the top of the cart, cups, and saucers tinkling in pieces on the hardwood floors. I reached out but missed the teapot by a centimeter. It hit the floor, going to pieces like a water balloon.
“Oh, now I’m teed off.” The aide shook her bobbed dark brown hair out of her face. “Okay, maybe more ‘teed on.’” The front of her scrub top was drenched.
Oh, Donna! I’m sorry!” I flared my nostrils but got no scent of blood. At least none of the broken china had cut Donna. I took a few steps back down the hall and opened the broom closet.
A long, wooden handle fell out and smacked me on the side of the head, stinging my dignity more than anything else. I bent to pick it up and got whacked in the back by the dustpan. All I
could do was sigh and snag the cleaning utensils. Sweeping up the china shards wasn’t easy, especially with some of them under the cart. But once Donna got the wheel back on, she pushed it forward so I could get the last of the mess. I dumped it all into a trash bin in the closet, then put out the sandwich-board sign to warn people about the wet floor until someone got a mop.
“Piso mojado.” Donna smirked. “Seeing that always makes me want pizza, even though I know it has nothing to do with cheesy oven-baked goodness.”
“Seriously, in total agreement with you.” I laughed. “But no time for pizza now. Have you seen Mr. Kazynski?”
“Oh, no, I haven’t.” Donna looked up the hall and then down it. “He actually hasn’t been here since last Friday. Mitzi said something about a stomach bug, I think.”
“Oh, okay.” Everyone knew Mitzi, a crow shifter, was the senior center’s biggest gossip.
“Guess that means you’ve got to take a walk, huh?” Donna peered down at her still wet top. “And I need to go change. Don’t want to go through the rest of the day smelling like bergamot, or people might think I’m having an affair with Captain Picard. I’ll tell the House staff about the spill so they can mop.”
“Thanks, Donna.” I pushed the cart more carefully, this time, getting it back to the little alcove next to the kitchen where someone would bus what was left on the tray. Then, I headed out the door and down the steps.
My first mistake was not taking a left when I was supposed to. I didn’t realize my mistake until I got all the way to Lippitt Park and the border of Providence and Pawtucket. I turned right around and marched back the way I came, bumping a woman coming out of a coffee shop. One of the coffees on her tray fell right off, lid popping to spill black coffee all over my pastel pink and white dress. At first, I was thankful it was iced instead of hot, but it felt like wearing ice later. I apologized and gave her five dollars before heading on my way.
